


No Discernible Aptitude

by CaptainWolfe11



Category: The Outer Worlds (Video Game)
Genre: Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Found Family, Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Optimism, Self-Doubt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:01:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27783412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainWolfe11/pseuds/CaptainWolfe11
Summary: When he thought about his greatest achievement—finally thawing out one of the colonists—he used to think about a dashing hero. A gunslinger or a confident stoic leader that he would guide toward greatness. But he hadn’t picked one of those, and guiding was beginning to look a lot like babysitting. Collection of one shots following the begrudging father/daughter relationship of Phineas and Haven, Captain of The Unreliable.
Relationships: The Captain & Phineas Welles
Comments: 12
Kudos: 14





	1. The Acid Conundrum: In which Phineas feels bad for encouraging a 19 year-old to kill people.

**Author's Note:**

> Just some one-shots I'm compiling as I run through my game with my hopeless, low-charm, low-strength, unending optimist Haven. Hope you enjoy!  
> And here's a little thumbnail I originally made for fanfiction.net

What was it NOW? He’d barely gotten two winks of sleep—out of his regular five or six—when his computer started blaring.

“INTRUDER…ALERT. INTRUDER…ALERT.”

He instinctively covered his ears and clambered out of his bed, nearly hitting his head on the bunk in the process. “Will you shut UP!” He yelled into the air, aiming his vitriol at the automated defense system. “What intruder, who’s intruding?” 

He hadn’t had the time, or inclination, to program the computer to respond differently to the Unreliable, so every time it screamed intruder, it was a toss-up. His tireless hero, or corporate pigs come to drag him away for execution?

“The UNRELIABLE has docked on landing pad two. One humanoid is approaching the lab. Female, age—”

“End alert, open lab doors.”

“Doors, open. Have a pleasant day.”

Pleasant _day_. Nothing was pleasant out here, especially not being woken up in the middle of the sleep cycle by a grating automated voice. He grabbed his lab coat and shrugged it on like a sagging second skin. This had _better_ be good. 

The girl was bright, but absolutely stupid in other ways. She could hack anything, run a diagnostic on ship systems, patch up a bullet wound and invent new ways to grow plants in the soil here—but by Law, she didn’t know when to leave people alone. 

It wasn’t enough, apparently, that she had to send him logs every day that detailed every single thing they did, every inane task and little side job. Once she’d devoted an entire PARAGRAPH to sprats and how cute they were, and the potential for domesticating them. 

Maybe he was being a little harsh, but it was hard enough already for him to get any sleep.

He rubbed his eyes and emerged into the bulletproof chamber he confined himself to when guests were around. He could only make out a colorful blob, pink and yellow, until he came closer and the glass stopped obscuring his vision. He took a deep breath and tried to push his annoyance into the past—along with his night of good rest.

Haven was sitting there, on a stool, obviously in her pajamas, a fuzzy yellow blanked draped over her shoulders. She was staring blankly off to the side, and in her arms she cradled a bottle of Rizzo’s purpleberry wine. This was starting to look less fun by the minute. “Ah, hello, Haven.”

She blinked and looked up at him. “Doctor Phineas?” Her voice was slurred, and the charming dirt that usually covered her cheeks had little tracks cutting through it. “I needed to talk to you about…something.” 

This was going to be complicated, wasn’t it? He’d dreamt over and over again of finally reviving someone, them helping him save the colony—and surely Haven was doing that. But it wasn’t simple with her. She, like any machine not suited to the job, required vast amounts of maintenance. “Sure sure, it’s not like it’s the middle of the sleep cycle or anything. Go right ahead.” 

Haven blinked, and parts of her bangs twitched as they stuck to her eyelashes. “Vicar and Felix, and Ellie. They don’t understand, they just don’t _get_ it. But I can’t stop seeing it—the screaming and the—the…” Her eyes drifted away, empty like glass. She swallowed. “I don’t know who else to talk to, Doctor. I know what I’m doing is important, but that woman…she…” 

Ah. So, it was another one of her existential crises…He felt a pang of sympathy for her. He did appreciate that she was a gentle soul, it just wasn’t that useful. It made the work slow and difficult, for him and for her. How much time in his life wouldn’t have been wasted, if he’d never been bothered by what he’d had to do?

“What happened, Haven. Can you walk me through it?” Not sure that was really the best option, but he needed to know what was going on with her. He was playing babysitter…again. He glanced over to the wall, where he’d put the ‘special’ wanted posters she’d brought him from the Groundbreaker. He was putting her art on the metaphorical fridge just like a babysitter, too. 

A hollow pop reverberated around the room as she yanked off the top of the wine bottle with a clenched fist. She took a drink, winced, and stoppered it again. “I don’t know…it was...I got separated from Max and Ellie. You know I’m not good close quarters and there was this woman, marauder lady.” He resisted the urge to make a ‘keep going’ gesture with his hand. The girl was physically there, in the room, but her gaze was far away, and so was her voice. 

“She was coming at me so I grabbed this, this gun that was lying on the table, and I shot it at her.” Her face took on an even more pallid color, washing out her freckles and making the dirt even starker. “But it wasn’t normal…It spewed _acid_ , all _over_ her. She was _screaming_ , just screaming, and I tried…” She raised a hand to her mouth as if to keep something locked away, a sob, a scream of her own? “I shot her again, to make it _stop_ , but that only made it _worse_ , so much worse. It was, like, hours, hours. And Vic came in and put a slug through,” she stopped to swallow a thick bubble of tears caught in her throat, “what was _left_ of her _face_.” 

Haven was trembling, somehow holding the blanket around her shoulders and hugging the wine bottle at the same time. Every ungenerous thing he'd ever thought of her raced through his mind. How he rolled his eyes whenever he got one of her updates, how he slapped his forehead every time she recounted walking into a trap because she had the gall to trust people. All the times he’d ever stared into space when she came here and ran her mouth a mile a minute— always with a cheerful tone that bounced off the tarnished steel walls like opposite sides of magnets repelling each other. So oblivious, so naive, so wasteful with her time—their time. 

But he had done that to her. He had read her file. He knew she was 19, ‘no discernible aptitude’ that she had been signed into servitude. He could have picked anyone else. Something about her individual aptitude scores—high intelligence, low charisma, hardy temperament—he supposed it had reminded him of himself. And she _was_ like him, crying over a few melting, screaming people. Grappling with death. But she was also so different. He should never have brought her into this world, not now, not this broken colony. 

“I can’t do it, Doctor Phineas, I can’t. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat…I’m just not hero potential, hero…hero material.” She made a general gesture of frustration with her right hand and the hem of her blanket sagged dangerously close to a puddle of liquefied cystypig. 

Oh, he knew what it was like to toss and turn and have sleep evade you at every impasse, to hear the screams of your victims in your ears even when no one was there. And he could imagine poor Haven, trapped in a room, desperately trying to save herself while also mitigating the harm she was inflicting. An _impossible_ equation. 

What he was doing wouldn’t work any longer. He glanced over at the still not-functioning security auto mechanical he was working on, sighed, and walked out of the door and into the outer lab. If this was some elaborate trap, he would hate what was left of himself forever. 

“Be careful, you’re about to get cystypig guts all over your nice blanket.” He gestured for her to get up.

“Oh.” She said dumbly, staggering upwards and watching him kick the stool over to a more gut-less area of the lab. She wiped her eyes. “Doctor, I just need help. You always seem to know what to say. I know I can’t let… _you_ down, or the colonists. But it’s just getting so hard.”

His formula for encouraging her was simple—give praise constantly, and act positive. He just hadn’t counted on it bringing her back to hear more of his ‘wisdom.’ He turned and looked at her—for the first time without a screen or glass between them since he’d revived her. Keeping her at arm’s length with rehearsed platitudes had worked for a certain amount of time, but now? 

She was _barely_ an adult. What had he been thinking, sending her off out there on her own? Sure, Hawthorne was supposed to take care of her, but that had been ludicrous judgement too, hadn’t it? Oh, put a young girl alone on a ship in space with a roguish gunslinger, that will be perfectly safe—nothing will go wrong there!

And here she was, soft blond hair with pink tips, freckles, button nose—the perfect visage for a character in an aetherwave drama that was supposed to represent thoughtless innocence. Her eyes were red, and she sniffed, wrapped like a ration bar in a ridiculous blanket that resembled yellow grass. The weight of how much she _trusted_ him fell onto his shoulders with crushing certainty. He hadn’t told her anything, about what he’d done or why he was a wanted man. He’d unfrozen her, sent her off, said some encouraging words about being a hero, and then he’d just given her orders. That she’d followed, one by one. 

“Haven…” He guided her back to the stool and reached for the bottle of wine, which she relinquished easily. “I know it’s hard. It’s hard to watch people die, especially by your own hand.” Especially when they’re screaming. And melting. “It must have been horrible.”

A look of absolute relief, and sadness, washed over her face, and she just nodded, vigorously. “So horrible.” She seemed to collapse in on herself.

If there was one thing he was especially bad at, it was comforting crying people. Was he supposed to _touch_ them, or just let them sob, or tell them to stop? Ugh, more complicated than his formula for reviving people from stasis, he was _sure_ he’d never be able to figure that one out. 

He needed some time to think, some space away from this _child_ that was now his responsibility. Somehow he'd thought she'd be doing work for _him_ , not the other way around! Some time to plan, plan! 

“I’m, ah, just going to make us some warm tea. Does that sound nice?” She didn’t say anything, but there was a vague movement that might have been a nod in between the shaking of her shoulders. “Oh good, I’ll be right back then.” 

He retreated into the bulletproof lab and shut the door like a man being chased by a mega raptidon. What the _fuck_ , had he gotten himself into. How long would it take her to leave if he just locked himself in his room and didn’t come out?

No, no, that wouldn’t work. Sooner or later, she’d learn the truth about him from the Board. He needed rapport, rapport! Otherwise this gentle, overly optimistic creature would hate him just as much as she hated them. And he needed her, whether they liked it or not.

He heated up some water over an open flame and found some caked auntie cleo ‘tea’ powder at the bottom of a tin. No telling how old that was. Oh well, nothing in it was real anyway, how could it go bad? 

Think, man, think! How was he supposed to deal with this? There was no manual for how to unfreeze colonists that were supposed to painfully liquefy, and he'd never found a _useful_ manual on how to deal with people. He'd tried. Haven's problem was that she smothered people with chattering and bubblegum until they ran away, and his? He treated people like pawns, because they were easier to deal with that way. Haven wasn't a chess piece he'd _ever_ encountered before. 

He hurried out with two, relatively clean tin cups of hot liquid. This was a ritual people did, right? Warm tea simulates warm contact?

“Bubbles?” She said softly, voice crackling from the intercom carrying it into the bulletproof lab. “Do you know that’s your name?” She sniffed. “Come ‘ere, Bubbles.” 

Well good, at least she was verbal again. He forced a smile on his face—she was helping him save the colony, the least he could do is help her feel better for killing people gruesomely in the name of his goal. “Here we are, two cups of auntie cleo’s powdered, corporate-flavored, not-tea.” 

She reached out and took it with a shaky hand. “I think I drank too much wine.” Her face was cleaner than he thought he’d ever seen it—even out of cryostasis—but it was also pitiful. Something about not seeing a smile on a face that so often had one was…disturbing. 

He really had been too judgmental of her, hadn’t he? 

“It’s just, I can’t sleep. Whenever I do, I see her face again. It was… _why_ is everything around here about who you can kill? I just want to go to Edgewater and help Adelaide with her garden.”

He hummed in agreement, but wasn’t really looking at her. Behind her was the cryopod she’d arrived in. The first one from the hope he’d seen in over 25 years. It might not be true on Earth—or maybe it was—but here, if you wanted to save people, you had to condemn a few others first. “How are your plants coming along on the ship?”

Haven seemed to shed some of her depressing miasma. “Oh, they’re doing good. They seem happy—I think soon we might even get to harvest them. Fresh food…And I’ve drawn up some plans—no human bodies, for it to…you know, work.” She took a drink of her tea and didn’t seem to react to the bitter taste that had made him set his aside. “I can send you the sch—schm…the plans.”

He nodded encouragingly. “I’d love to see them.” 

And there it was, her first smile tonight. She wiped her face absently, though her tears had long since dried in the stale air of the lab. 

“Haven.” He didn’t know if this was the time to say it, but she seemed like she could use a little honesty from him—the barest amount he dared to offer. “I need to admit something to you.” 

“Okay.” Her full attention was on him—when it was, he had to admit, he felt like he was the only person in the whole colony. One of her strengths, he supposed, was really listening to people. She just had a difficult time realizing when people were lying. 

“Well, it was selfish of me, to pick you out of all of the Hope’s colonists. And I did pick you—you. You aren’t just someone random that I’ve ended up stuck with. In your files, you reminded me of how I used to be, when I was young and didn’t realize how much the board was ruining _everything_.” How stupid of him, to see aptitude scores and assume what kind of person she was. He’d thought she’d be easy to work with, because they seemed similar. But her skills manifested in a completely different way.

“But I realize that I was wrong, to do this to you, to put all of this pressure on you. I have no doubt that you will help me save your fellow colonists, but I’m sorry that I’m putting you through all of these...adverse life experiences.” 

Haven was silent for a minute, taking on as much of a sober look as she could. “No, it’s not you, Doctor Phineas. It’s the Board and bad people that make everything like it is. If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be killing each other for bits and piecemeal. It’s not you…I’m just not cut out for this kind of living. Lucky I have people on my ship who can teach me about surviving here.” 

“But this job I’ve given you, this pressure—”

“Doctor, that’s the best thing that you’ve done for me!” Haven sat up so straight in such a short period of time that he was certain she’d lose what was left of her balance and fall over. Instead, she remained perched on the stool, blanket ruffling out in all directions like wild canid feathers. “No one has ever, _ever_ told me that I had an important job, that no one else could do, that I—I mean to say…” She frowned and took a moment to collect herself. “You told me that I can do great things, that I have the power to do good and help people? No one has ever talked to me like that, like I was good at something.” 

And just like that, he was smothered by every ‘encouraging’ word he’d ever given her—his paradigm of ‘give praise and stay positive’ had worked, of course it had. She couldn’t tell that it was half-hearted because she’d never heard the genuine article. A heavy pit was generating in his stomach, like he’d eaten some tarmac, sans the cheese.

“So now maybe I’m believing it a little bit too. Now if I could just…sleep with some of the stuff I’ve had to do a little better…” She looked down at her tea with a frown, like she was wishing it was more wine. 

“You know what it means?” He was talking, he could hear his voice, but it sounded so much more tired than it normally did. “It means you’re a good person. It bothers you because you’re a good person. Not liking the act of killing isn’t a weakness, Haven.”

When she looked up at him, he saw a depth there that he’d never bothered to notice. A ladder of pain, loneliness, hope, confusion, doubt. Her happiness and joy was a choice, the way she chose to interface with everyone, everything. “You mean that?” She smiled. “Well, I want to be a good person.”

“Want to be? You already are. That woman made her choice, and you _had_ to make yours. You have to accept it, move on. Keep working. Nose to the conveyor belt, all of that.” Ah, but he wasn’t really talking about Haven, was he?

Haven nodded, squared her shoulders. “Okay. I think I get it.” The braggadocio lasted for about three seconds, though, replaced by—if he wasn’t mistaken—embarrassment? “But…what do I do about the not sleeping thing?”

Oh dear. If he had a real remedy for that…Ack! She was too young to be worrying about things like this. He could only hope that she would move past them, and not be scarred by them forever. He didn't want to be responsible for that. “Honestly, when I can’t sleep I take a mild tranquilizer. It helps, a little.” 

She gave him a chiding look—as much of one a pink-yellow fairy could really muster. “I told you, you have too much caffeine. That’s not good for sleeping. Or your blood vessels. But, yeah…I’ll see what Ellie has for that.”

Caffeine, eh? If only it was that simple! He grabbed the bottle of wine from the tool cart it had ended up on, and pointedly placed it on the bottom shelf. “All I know for _certain_ is that alcohol does not help. Believe me.”

If she had heard the darkness in his voice, she made no indication, only shrugging casually. “I know. But I didn’t know what else to do. Thanks, Doctor.”

“You know, I never _technically_ earned that title.” He’d let her call him that this whole time, but it was a lie, just like so much else. It was beginning to sour, this optimistic young woman looking up to him like he could do no wrong. When she found out what he’d done to get here, she would never look at him the same. She might even give the bulletproof glass a run for its money. 

“Oh.” She sniffed. “Okay. Well, I guess we should be on our way to Monarch, to find that Hiram Blythe man.” She stood up, wobbled briefly, and set her tea down on an operating table mostly occupied by rotting cystypig. “Oh, hmm. Too much to drink.” 

He sighed. “Get some rest before you go down there, Monarch is a dangerous place.” 

Haven smiled and, like she’d done it one hundred times, wobbled over to him and hugged him, ignoring his gestural protestations. He froze like a cystypig in cryostasis. “I’m going to come back and clean this place.” She patted his shoulder. “It’s really disgusting.” 

She adjusted her blanket one more time and squinted at the floor to make sure it wasn’t going to touch any cysty-guts, and then she made her slow, careful, drunk way out of the corridor and back to her ship. 

“Use the railing! Don’t fall to your death, that would be very anti-climactic!” He called after her. 

“Got it!” 

He pinched the bridge of his nose. Haven. A harbor, or port. A place of safety, a refuge, or somewhere offering favorable conditions for growth. He had to admit, when he saw that name on the file, it made him stop. A name like that was memorable, a name like that belonged in the history books. He might never have stopped to read more about her aptitude tests if her name hadn’t stood out as something he needed, something they all needed. 

But she was hardly more than a child, and he’d put that burden on her because of some misplaced, fanciful idea that belonged in an aetherwave drama, not real life. He walked back into his main lab, and booted up his terminal. The file labeled “Reports” was full of Haven’s idea of progress reports. They were more like narrations of everything her and her ragtag group of dissidents had accomplished any given day. 

He scrolled to one about a week old, and skimmed until he found the paragraph he was looking for. 

_So I finally learned that they’re called Sprats. Like rats. I’ve seen them around everywhere. I wonder how they spread to all of the planets? Surely they couldn’t co-evolve so similarly. I suppose that’s true of canids too (though don’t get me started on them—I’m going to find a canid puppy one day, I swear by Law). So I was thinking, I’m sure you could domesticate them. They are really cute. Rats are super smart, so I wonder if sprats are too. You could maybe train them to pass messages or open doors from the other side by crawling through vents, or have them carry local EM wave emitters into computer rooms to sabotage output, that sort of thing. Or maybe it would just be nice to have a little friend. Not everyone has to be useful like that to earn its keep._

It wasn’t going to be enough to move people around like pawns anymore. He was going to have to get to know them, and he had a feeling there was a wealth of information here that he’d overlooked. 

There was a ping on the terminal. New message?

A set of genetic markers for organic material, schematics for organizing a small hydroponic array, and the combination of lights used to simulate the sun for plant growth. 

_here’s the plans. you know what i just realized? you came out of your glass to give me some tea. it was really bad, but that’s not what matters._

__

__

_thanks, haven._

“You’re welcome.” He said to no one in particular. Well, maybe Bubbles had heard him.


	2. Spring Cleaning: In Which Haven Reveals Why She Came to Halcyon

“Phineas.” She said gravely. “Your cataloging system is worse than, worse than…” Haven paused and looked blankly at the wall in front of her, trying to think of something truly terrible. “I don’t know, but it’s pretty bad.”

“Worse than pickled mantisuar feet? Falling to your death from a considerable height? Having the Board subject you to a life of meaningless indentured servitude?” Phineas suggested, from where he was—finally—mopping up the remains of a cystypig.

Haven shook her head. “Those things are pretty bad. What this organization system has in common with them is that it makes me die a little inside.”

“Oh come now, I can find everything I need. The redacted article on the effects of caffeine on cystypig tumor flavor? Folder 237, File 6.”

Haven narrowed her eyes at him, but couldn’t repress a smile at the challenge. He was pulling her leg, no way that was right! She turned back to the terminal and pecked away until she reached the file in the directory labeled 237_6. _Chemical compounds and their effect on benign cystypig growths: Caffeine and other stimulants._ “What the frick frack snik snack."

Phineas grinned and pushed up his protective goggles. “See, organized chaos.”

Haven backed out of the file and saw the whole branching map—it was like pictures she’d seen in her textbooks of spiders trying to make webs while on LSD. “Looking at this is giving _me_ a tumor. Aw, Phin, _please_ let me re-organize this?”

He set his mop down and started dragging the canid corpses over to one of the escape pod doors. “Ohh no, absolutely not. I’d never be able to find anything in your imposed order. Organizational tyranny, is what I call that.”

Haven frowned. There was no way she could do work on this terminal. It was stressing her out just looking at it. That was why they were cleaning the place after all, because she couldn’t focus on working when there was so much grime and dust and blood everywhere. “All right, then this data is going on a cartridge and into your main lab—and I’m wiping this terminal clean.”

“But I _like_ that terminal!” The canid’s head slammed against the metal trap door with an unceremonious thud.

Haven stood her ground in the area she’d cordoned off as hers. This was where her pod was, anyway, her home for seventy years. “Hey, you said this area is mine! Which means this terminal is mine. I can’t look at this jumble of folders and feel anything but existential pain.”

Phineas groaned dramatically and started dragging the second canid over. “Fine, spoil sport. Organize them. I’ll never be able to find anything again.”

Haven grinned and clapped her hands together. “Yes! Thank you! Oh this is going to be so much fun.” She would get to organize, and classify, and apply subject headings, and write a new interface for accessing said headings! She ran over to give him a hug.

Sensing her intent, Phineas tried half-heartedly to escape. “No no, I’m covered in pig remains!” He grumbled as he picked his way past an overturned stool.

“I don’t care!” She gave him a quick hug—he didn’t seem to like them, after all—and dragged the second canid the rest of the way for him. “Wow, this place is going to be so clean and wonderful! And we can put your posters up where people can see them, the pretty biology ones.”

She walked around the lab and squinted through the screen she’d made with her thumb and forefingers. “Having a desk, in a secret lab, in an asteroid in space? If I could go back in time and tell myself that when I was a little girl…Maybe I never would have felt silly for liking smart things.” She made her way back to the terminal and started cordoning off certain folder collections for arrangement.

“You felt silly for being smart?”

Well, with how everyone at school treated her? None of them had been into the things she’d liked. Digital stewardship, gene editing, animal biology, physics, playing the kalimba. “No one wanted to play with me, or talk to me. I was the weird kid who liked weird things and made messes and caused problems and…” She thought of mother and father, when they made her deconstruct her basement lab, “…didn’t do what people wanted them to.” She’d always tried to listen, follow their rules. When she broke them, it was because she couldn’t help herself. Doing little projects to stay entertained wasn’t so terrible, right? “But, I’m glad no one was happy with me, cause then I wouldn’t be here.”

Phineas hummed. “Ah, so you came to Halcyon to escape judgement?”

“I…mean…” She guessed so? Wait, didn’t he…know? “Haven’t you read my file?”

She looked over to see him straightening out an air duct pipe. “Of course. Extensively. Your favorite color is purple and you had a pet fish when you were five called Charles.”

“Doesn’t it tell you about…you know.” Was he just joking with her? “How I got here?”

He turned away from his work and gave her a quizzical look. “You got here on the Hope. You entered yourself into an indenturement clause with Kolway Pharmaceuticals to pay for the trip.” He was looking doubtful now, probably because she was acting so weird.

Haven couldn’t believe it. Her file mentioned the name of her dead pet fish, but it didn’t mention that…that…She blinked and turned away from the eye contact she’d been making with him.

“Wow, I guess I thought you knew or something.” Her chest could have been constricted by a mantiswarm, with how tight it felt. She tapped away at the keys of the terminal, but she wasn’t really reading the words on the screen. “I mean, it’s not a big deal, like I’m hiding it or anything. It’s just sort of stupid.” She’d been happy this whole time thinking that it wouldn’t come up. Because of course he already knew, he had to know, he knew everything. “My parents entered me into the contract. Exploited a loophole to sign it in my name. I didn’t want to come here. They forced me to.”

“Why?”

Law, she must’ve asked mother that so many times, and she’d always gotten the same answer. “I guess…I guess it’s impossible to know for sure really. But mom told me that—something about a debt or something.”

Phineas blinked at her, eyebrows raised in—surprise? “They sold you to a corporation? To pay a _debt_?”

Haven looked down at her fingers on the keypad, at how they fit just right into the little indentations in the keys. “I know, it’s stupid right? It’s like…It’s not like I’m sad, it’s more like—” How stupid was it, being sold by your own parents?

“Like, wow, shouldn’t that have been more hard for them? Like, what should I have done differently to make it harder for them?” She wasn’t explaining it right, and there was a mockapple stuck in her throat, making it sore and swollen and difficult to breath through. “Anyway—tangent. I just meant…it’s cool to have a place in a secret lab.” Her voice broke on the word lab, making it more like a whisper.

There was a long, unbearable pause. Ugh, she just needed to focus on these files. Organizing would really calm her down and make her feel a _lot_ better.

“Well, one person’s trash is another’s treasure, I suppose.” Said Phineas, with the squishing sound of mopping accentuating his speech. “No matter _what_ they were thinking, I’m glad you were on the Hope. I shudder to think about what life would be like if I hadn’t had the option of picking _you_.” Haven blinked, and glanced over to him. He’d straightened out, and was tapping the knuckle of his forefinger against his chin. “There was a man who lost his arm in a canning accident and had anger issues, what if I’d been stuck with him?” He smiled slyly and looked at her out of the corner of his eye.

Haven couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m sure that man is very capable. And I’m sure we’ll get to meet him, someday soon.”

Phineas put the mop down and walked over to her. “Haven, this is very important to remember—more important than anything I’ve ever told you!” His finger stabbed the air to emphasize the point, but his theatrics melted away a moment later. He looked conflicted for the briefest moment, then gripped her shoulders with both hands. “You don’t have to do anything, to deserve being treated like a human being.” His eyes were so intense, not crazy intense, but…serious intense. “You don’t have to do _anything_ differently, to be the wonderful person you are right now.”

It was like something from a vid, something she’d rehearsed in her head every night for months. Only, in her daydreams, her mother or father was the one saying it to her, apologizing for the things they’d said—not for what they’d done really, but for how they’d made her feel. Things they didn’t even know they’d done to her.

She didn’t want to cry, didn’t want to. She forced her eyes closed and nodded. “Okay. Okay. I’ll remember.”

“What do you call those things? Ah yes… _hugs_. Come here.” And then _he_ , hugged _her._ It was like he wanted her to cry, because it was just too much.

She gripped the back of his pig-juice dusted lab coat and cried. “I’m s-sorry. I just n-need to cry.”

“That’s okay. My coat’s already covered in mucoid material, why not make it diverse?”

Haven laughed as she was crying, a funny feeling that felt a lot like being in Halcyon. Sad, but happy. Difficult, but fun. Painful, but palliative. 

He patted her shoulder. “I’m going to have to have a word with your parents, even if it takes _years_ for transmissions to get to Earth and back.”

Haven sniffed. “Wouldn’t they be dead by now?” She pulled away and wiped at her eyes with the heel of her palm. “It’s been such a long time.”

Phineas scratched his head. “Oh…right.”

“You know…it’s okay.” She tried to imagine them, what their life had been like after she left. How long had it taken for them to hear about the Hope, that something had gone wrong? Had they even cared? Mother would have gone on with her garden parties, father would have been at the office from dawn til dusk, making bigger and deadlier weapons for the Earth military. And…no more interruptions, or chemical explosions, or awkward dinners. Just the two of them, in their own little worlds.

“I’m sure they had a nice time with their money, and now I get to do cool things here. It worked out for everyone.” Sure, she hadn’t wanted to leave, but would her life have been any better there? “I don’t want to hold a grudge. Against them…or against myself, too, I guess.”

“You’re a better person than I, that’s for _sure_.” Phineas’ eyes narrowed, and he sounded like he did whenever he talked about the Board. Like he wouldn’t mind dropping a fusion bomb on something. Haven supposed it was nice, someone getting angry on her behalf.

She shrugged. She wanted to let it go, to just focus on the here and now. The Lab and Bubbles and Phin and Felix and Parvati. All her crew and the ship and ADA. It was a nice life, but the guilt had a way of chasing her, looking into her eyes like a flashlight at the doctor’s office.

“I guess it’s just like, they’re your parents. It’s their job to love you, and support you. So when they don’t…I mean when you have to fight them to…to do anything important to you—it just feels wrong? Like you’re doing something wrong?” She massaged the palm of her left hand with the thumb and forefinger of her right, felt the tendons and the bone and the muscle. “With them being dead and all, it’s funny they still bother me so much.”

She looked up at Phineas, who was still watching her, listening through her rambles. She felt a lump in her throat and suddenly felt silly for talking so much about it. She tried to smile. “Think there are any shrinks on the Hope?”

He grinned. “Oh plenty, I’m sure. _They’re_ going to have their work cut out for them when _they_ wake up.”

The world was so heavy. Everything in it. Weapons and armor and sadness and grief. Laws and red-tape, and bureaucracy, and greed. And her, too. She sat down on the desk—her desk—and wrapped her arms around herself. “All I ever wanted was to make them proud. But according to the Vicar, you can’t wait around all your life for the judgement of people who aren’t even there anymore. I think that’s smart, but I don’t know how to do it.”

“Hiding away on an asteroid in the middle of nowhere is a pretty good start.” Phineas’ joking smile faded away, and he became serious. Somber. “If I’d listened to what everyone said about me, I wouldn’t be here.” Yeah, she’d read the posters. They said some pretty vicious things, but that was just Board propaganda.

He put a hand on her shoulder. Like dad used to do when she was little, when he was still around. “I know it’s not the same, but _I’m_ proud of you.” Haven let a shaky breath out through her nose and nodded, eyes closed. Why was it that she always felt like crying when people were nice? That was when you were supposed to be happy! And she _was_ happy.

“I promise I’m feeling better, I don’t know why I keep—keep sniffling.” She mumbled, wiping at her eyes with a rough sleeve.

“You’re sniffling because that’s not something you should have to hear from a crazy old man in an abandoned Auntie Cleo storage facility.”

Haven laughed and shoved him a little. Bubbles grunted and sniffed at Haven’s foot, having saddled over there while her eyes were closed. Just like that, she remembered how lucky she was, how many friends she had now. How comfortable she felt here. “Hey, but you’re a _nice_ crazy old man in a _cool_ abandoned Auntie Cleo storage facility. And it doesn’t belong to those top-rungers anymore, it belongs to _us_!”

Phineas grinned and snapped his goggles back on. “That’s _right_ , and we’re going to throw string lights all over this place in a clear violation of Auntie Cleo’s Décor Rules Section 7 Subsection J, Postscript 4.6.”

Haven hopped off of the table and spun around, looking up at where the lights were going to hang from. “I have so many lights, I collect them wherever I go!” Piles in the cargo bay, coils of them in her room…

Phineas hummed to himself. “And yet you somehow leave those places brighter than they were before. How _intriguing_.”


	3. The Discovery: In Which Phineas is Forgiven

“I, ah. Thought you might want these.” Haven pulled something out of her pocket—three data cartridges. This whole time she’d appeared unruffled. Covered in grease and blood and dirt, hair askew—but unruffled. Her usual brand of determination and temporary trauma repression. But now she actually appeared the way she should—like she’d been to Tartarus and back. “I took them from the Hope. Then I wiped the computers.” She held them like they were made of lead and uranium, not silicon and plastic.

“What’s this?” He asked, without touching them. Something about the way she was saying it made him wary. Was this about the crew logs? They had—

Ah.

No, it wasn’t about those.

“Audio logs. Some of them are from when you picked me up. Others are…About the other colonists.”

He knew it was coming, of course. Leave it to Haven to root around rusty terminals when she’s being shot at by corporate thugs. Everything he’d tried to do to dispel the strange reverence she seemed to hold for him had been unsuccessful. Not like he’d wanted it to work, but after he’d realized she cared beyond the simple flattery, he’d been interested to see if there was a limit. He’d always known this was the final test.

“I never tried to keep it from you. But I admit I…didn’t try to bring it up, either.” He took the cartridges from her, felt a sigh force its way out of his chest. He didn’t want to look at her. Couldn’t, look at her. Had he grown so used to her adoration that it was such a burden not to have it? “I’m sorry, Haven. I’m not the person you thought I was.”

She sat down next to him, on the edge of the bed like him, to keep her head from hitting the top of the bunk. Her legs stretched out in front of her, and she rubbed her hands down them. Blood on her knuckles, ash caking the zipper of her overalls. “I…I understand what you were trying to do.” Her voice was soft. “It must have been horrible.”

“It was a mistake.” He replied instantly. Not just horrible. A horrible _mistake_. “I was playing with lives, didn’t respect the process. It could have been you.”

They stared out of the window. Past the gilded MSI lamps and the iconoclast banners, past the unfinished chess game, past the terminal. “I’ve killed people too.”

“They were _shooting_ at you.” Marauders and outlaws, they didn’t deserve mercy. The fact that Haven seemed to think so was an interesting quirk of hers. 

“I killed the subjects in the corporate lab, to bring you all the chemicals.” Her voice was barely audible, but it didn’t waver at all. “I killed the chairman, and he wasn’t even armed.” She let out a slow, long breath—once again running her palms from her hips to her knees. Self-soothing behavior? 

“Maybe sometimes…maybe sometimes to help a lot of people…you have to sacrifice your…I don’t know, feeling good because you know you never did anything wrong.” She shrugged. “That’s what Max told me once. I don’t know, I just know it’s easier now, for things to start getting better.”

She didn’t understand, it was clear that she couldn’t. Those people didn’t have to die—he had been too proud to see the obvious flaws in his process, too impatient to wait for animal test subjects to remain in stasis long enough to mimic the long-term side effects of the colonists. She had every right to call him a monster—this would be easier if she would.

When he’d revived her, when it had worked, it was like a weight being lifted off of his shoulders. It meant that all of that torture, all of that pain, had gone towards something productive. But still, his predictions of success had been abysmal. Go back and do it again, and she might not be here. She might be a puddle in the middle of his lab that he kept forgetting to clean up.

“Are you going to be okay?” She asked, hand on his shoulder. As if talking about it was worse than living it—he’d made it this far. Maybe okay was the wrong word, but he’d _made it this far_.

“I wasn’t going to let it happen to you.” He focused on one of the game pieces, a red one that hadn’t been occluded by the edge of the table. “The liquefaction might’ve happened, of course. But I wasn’t prepared to count the seconds, for science or otherwise.”

The emptiness where her hand had been was cold. Was she thinking back, the clever girl? To the first time she’d come to the lab and examined her pod? When she’d asked if she could keep the gun that was on the table right next to it?

“I’m not looking for forgiveness. Absolution, maybe? If I can just, _help_ the other colonists, maybe it will be worth everything.”

Haven reached up and grabbed her beanie, and in one fluid motion, dragged it off of her head and deposited it onto the floor. Her hair followed it before giving up the chase and falling to either side in a cloud of intermingled strands. The part of his brain that felt the need to always think something ridiculous pointed out that he could measure the passage of time based on the blonde-to pink ratio of her bob. 

She sighed and used the back of her hand to wipe some grime off of her face. “Look. I know you think I’m a little soft in the logic centers. The self-preservation zone. But you know what _I_ call it? I call it, a _trade_.” Her wrists rested on her knees, palms upward and gesturing in claw like motions whenever she emphasized a word. “If I can’t _sympathize_ , or _care_ , or _hope_ , in order to be safe and look out for myself, I don’t want to be safe! So, I just want you to know, that when I’m being all ‘goodie goodie,’ like Ellie calls it, it’s not charity, it’s not because I’m _stupid_.” She looked at him and shrugged. “I _know_. I understand, what I might be losing.” Her face softened. “And I forgive you.”

“Haven—”

She enveloped him an a loose hug. “Please, Phineas. I know what it’s like to be so ashamed, and disgusted with yourself, and just—just please let me forgive you. Believe it, please.”

“All right.” Her. Just her forgiveness. Not the others. He wouldn’t let anyone forgive him for the others. Haven sighed and stood up, a few of her young bones popping as she did. Must be all that crouching and sneaking around she always did.

She made her way to her storage container. “Can I show you something? It’s silly, but…” After a few moments of digging around, she pulled out a metal box, fairly small and unblemished. “So we each got these little boxes. Hardly big enough to hold a data cartridge. I, ah, found time to go looking for it.” She pulled over her chair so she could sit in front of him, and opened the box with a four digit code. Inside was a data cartridge, and one or two other things fit in around the edges. A button, a scrap of cloth, and—She pulled something out, and motioned for him to hold out his palm. “My favorite tree, _Ginkgo biloba_.”

Something small and smooth and light colored fell into his hand. He couldn’t believe it, it was actually something organic from earth. Well, besides humans. A plant native to the world his species had evolved on, and it was resting in the ridge between two of his fingers.

“I know it won’t survive here, but I’m going to try and use it’s genes to make a new tree, half Halcyon and half Earth. I thought, while we’re on the Hope, I could start a garden there, for people to see when they wake up.” That was just like Haven. Trying to make people happy by splicing genes, and making something more beautiful than it had been before. “I thought maybe we could do it together.”

She shrugged and pulled the button out, twisted it in her grasp. It was plastic, faux wood. Most of the brown paint had worn off. “I mean, it’s going to be stressful, waking people up all day long. But I also know you always have to be working on something. So in our free time, we can work on this!” She looked at him like she almost expected him to say no, like he would be doing _her_ a favor by accepting this project collaboration.

Ah, he was old. He’d only had enough left in him to dream of atoning for his past mistakes. This young woman’s generosity was surprising him day by day. “Nothing would make me happier.”

She grinned. “Do you want to see some pictures of my favorite Earth places?” She replaced the button with the data cartridge and didn’t wait for his reply before sliding over to her terminal on the wheeled desk chair.

“Of course.” He cleared his throat. Just because he knew it would cause her to overreact—and because it was true—he added, “I’ve never seen any pictures of Earth.”

Haven turned around from putting the cartridge in the computer and looked both extremely happy, and mortally wounded. “Law, really?! Oh you have to see these! Come here, come here, you can have the chair!”

He stood up and hobbled over—perhaps Akande had done more harm than he thought. “All right, all right. If you insist.” He settled down in the leather chair and watched her bypass a level of decryption that he would have been incapable of cracking.

“Okay, okay, this is my house! I guess it isn’t anymore. My house is this ship, or the lab, or my pod. Or the Hope! But this used to be my house. It’s raining in the picture.” She pushed the chair forward so that he was directly in front of the terminal. “Here, you can click through it.”

The metal architecture was nothing like the prefab buildings in Halcyon. It was minimal, stark, Euclidian. And remarkably clean. It was large by Halcyon standards, but it could have been average for Earth, not enough data for him to know. He imagined little Haven, running around, trying to get her parents attention with whatever experiment she was doing, whatever activity she was scraping together on her own to enrich a mind no one seemed to care about.

The next picture was of an ocean. And pale yellow sand. The corner of it was dominated by a fuzzy blur that might have been a dog—a real dog!—that was contorted in either excitement or terror.

“Oh, look at Pimsey! So cute! And that’s my favorite beach! There’s this sand dune, and it’s really big, and—” She threw one arm around his shoulder and pointed vigorously at the picture while describing things that weren’t captured in the pixels.

His data cartridges pressed up against his side in the pocket of his lab coat. A necessary reminder of what had come before. And on his other side, an equally important reminder of what would remain long after he was gone.


End file.
